


Teshuva

by JHSC



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes-centric, Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Gen, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Judaism, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Mother-Son Relationship, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Repentance, Suicidal Thoughts, Yom Kippur | Atonement Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-11
Updated: 2017-06-11
Packaged: 2018-11-12 18:14:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11167353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JHSC/pseuds/JHSC
Summary: The first person he remembers is Steve.The second person he remembers is his mother.





	Teshuva

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chrism](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chrism/gifts).



*

The other man falls.

Emotions hit him one after another: fear, loss, desperation. He dives after the man he was fighting. The man who knows him, knows his name. Pulls him out of the water and into the air and up onto the riverbank. Sees him take a breath. Feels nothing but warm relief. Doesn’t know why.

Shame and anger hit, confusion and fear. He leaves the man there. Searches for cover. A good hiding place. Before anyone can come and take him away.

The metro has been shut down, the highways shut down. He hides for two days, squatting beneath an underpass, a space so small and cramped that no one else would use it, no one else would even know it was there. He isn’t seen. He curls up on the ground wrapped in a stolen blanket, and waits for the tidal surge of emotions to either drown him or deposit him on dry land.

The man...the man he pulled from the river is named Steve. He tries to identify the individual emotions that rise to the surface when he thinks about Steve, when he replays Steve’s words in his mind and sees the faintest flickers of memories skitter in and out of his mind’s eye. Steve means pride. Steve means contentment. Steve means safety.

When he thinks about himself, who he is, who Steve says he is...he doesn’t have words for that.

Once he can take a step without feeling like the world is spinning around him, like it will throw him off his feet at any moment, he leaves his hiding spot. Leaves his weapons, waterlogged electronics, and tactical suit behind, steals fresh clothing from a line, steals gloves and a cap from a convenience store.

He goes to the exhibit at the Smithsonian. There are banners and placards and posters advertising it all across the city. He sneaks in, reads about himself, Bucky Barnes, words etched into a glass wall like ice, and tries to remember.

*

Once the roadblocks come down and the metro resumes service, he finally gets out of Washington, DC and follows a long, winding path to New York City.

He doesn’t go to Brooklyn, where he knows Steve is from, where he is from. Hydra will have the whole borough watched, he knows. He doesn’t remember the streets well enough to avoid being seen. And it isn’t where he wants to be, not yet.

Instead, he spends an hour staring up at an old tenement building on East 5th Street. It’s a building he knows he’s never entered in his life, but somehow he knows it. Knows every brick, every window, and knows the sorrow that rises up like a flood is somehow connected with those two facts. He doesn’t know why.

*

He sneaks aboard a passenger ship, some kind of luxury liner headed for Europe. Nine days, it takes, to cross the ocean. None of the conversations he overhears mention torpedoes, or U-Boats, or the Battle of the Atlantic. He knows the war is long over, knows that time has passed. But it’s strange to be on a ship again, nonetheless, and not worry about anything other than avoiding mediocre ship security personnel, visiting the buffet line, and keeping his hand hidden in the pocket of his stolen sweatshirt.

He identifies feelings: dread, insecurity, fear, and confusion. They churn in his stomach, make him fight for air. He doesn’t know what to do with them.

The ship disembarks in Hamburg; the port’s been rebuilt since the days when Operation Gomorrah reduced it to splinters and ash. Walking past the Flakturm makes him uneasy, like he’s a the center of an oppressive, knowing gaze, and he heads out of the city as soon as he can.

He travels south, for the most part. Sometimes east or west, sometimes backtracking north for a few miles, but he tries to get out of Germany as fast as he can.

He knows better than to hitchhike. He spends a lot of time walking, a lot of time sneaking on and off trains. He hides his face, hunches his shoulders with his hands in his pockets, makes himself look useless and unassuming and unthreatening. He always hops off the trains before they reach the end of the line.

*

The more time passes, the more uncomfortable he is with stealing the things he needs to survive. It’s a sin borne out of necessity. He takes necessities only from bigger stores that can absorb the theft more easily, not the little storefronts or carts that barely break even every day. He tries to pick the pockets of people who look like they can afford to lose the contents of their wallets. He tries panhandling, some days, his arm tucked up inside his jacket, but he doesn’t much like the attention, the glances that skirt across him, if only for a second.

He finds himself more and more often visiting little kitchens in the backs of churches, standing in line, saying grace over a simple meal.

He doesn’t remember being confirmed, but he must have been. Because he remembers going to confession, at a church just down from the Brooklyn Bridge. He remembers going to confession, telling a man hidden behind a screen all the bad things he had done in a week, being told to do his penance and that he’d be forgiven. Say so many Hail Marys and your sins are erased.

But he also remembers his mother telling him it’s not that easy. That he has to repent his behavior, and correct it, and act with humility so as to prove to God that he deserves forgiveness. That he must work for his repentance.

He doesn’t remember his mother’s name, but he remembers her regret.

*

A church in Prague has a stack of blank, dusty black notebooks sitting forgotten in a corner. He almost steals them. He’s stopped by a sudden surge of strong emotions rising up from somewhere deep inside, and it takes ten minutes of quietly breathing deep breaths in a corner before he can put a name to them. Shame. Embarrassment. Self-disgust.

He doesn’t steal them. Instead, he asks. And with the permission of the parishioner running this little soup kitchen, he takes two.

In the first, he pastes the photograph of Captain America — Steve — that he’s been carrying around since the Smithsonian. He writes what happened during their last fight. It comes out in short, awkward sentences. Even including all the things Steve said, it still barely takes up a full page.

He writes it out a second time. Tries to fill in the pieces that are so obviously missing from the first draft: How he knows Steve. Why he knows Steve. How Steve knows him. Who Steve is. Who _he_ is. How he feels about it all.

He can feel the emotions. He’s working on identifying them. What he can’t figure out is how to express them.

He keeps moving.

*

Bucky finds himself in Częstochowa. It isn’t until he arrives and sees the sign that he remembers his mother telling him it’s where her parents were from.

They would go to the church by the Brooklyn Bridge on Sundays, and then they would walk across the bridge together, he and his mother and… and his sisters. They would walk to the Lower East Side, and they would stand on the sidewalk across from a tenement on East 5th Street. They wouldn’t come in. No one would come out. There they would stand, and then off they would go, back to Brooklyn.

Bucky remembers asking why. He doesn’t remember his mother’s answer.

*

In the second notebook, the one not dedicated to memories of a life he barely recalls living, he starts a list.

Each item is a name, or should be a name, but for many of them that’s a detail he lacks. Not because his mind can’t clearly recall, but because he was never told. So instead, it’s _a blonde woman in a blue dress, a man in a motorcade, a man in a brown apartment._

He keeps the notebooks in a bag strapped to his back at all times. Sometimes, on the train or in a church basement or in a secluded spot out of sight of snipers, he’ll pull one or the other out and add another piece, another detail, another forgotten emotion. The first book encompasses any number of remembered feelings. The second is filled with just one.

 _You must acknowledge the sin before you can repent_.

*

“Because I loved your father,” she’d said. “I didn’t repent, and they didn’t forgive.”

*

He walks across Częstochowa three times, taking different routes each day, being careful to avoid police and cameras and standing out. It’s a nice city. There’s a famous church. A famous painting. A famous castle. He wonders why his mother’s parents ever left. What drove them to leave home, what drove them to stay away.

He wonders if there might still be family here. They must have left behind plenty of relatives — siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews — who might still be living in the same family homes. With the same family name. With the same dark hair and deep eyes that Bucky didn’t get from the Barnes side, that Bucky hasn’t seen in anyone else’s face since he kissed his sisters goodbye in 1938.

Fifteen minutes at an internet cafe gives him enough time to search Częstochowa for his mother’s maiden name and fail to find a single record past 1944.

Bucky collects disappointment and dismay, and adds them to the emotions he can now name.

*

He travels sixty miles south. Pays the admittance fee with stolen złotys. Listens to the tour in Polish, because hearing the story in English would be too much, and in Russian would be...not enough.

He has no memory of crying. Not since...not since waking up on a helicarrier to a man saying his name like it meant something to him. Like it meant anything at all.

Bucky shuffles silently through the halls, and listens to the guide, and reads the placards, and watches as every other person breaks down in tears, and tells himself he needs to blend in, and tells himself he needs to go unnoticed, and tells himself there’s no possible way he could recognize the faces in the photos, there’s no possible way he could recognize the shape of an eye or the angle of a brow, and there’s no possible way he could have saved them from the camp even if he hadn’t fallen, he hadn’t known, he hadn’t known.

It’s important to blend in, and so he does.

*

Afterward, much afterward, he gets off the bus at a tiny village in the countryside and starts walking out across the fields. Away from the noise. Away from the people. Away from everything.

He walks until he’s surrounded by nothing but hills and fallow fields, and then he sits down on the wild grass and wipes his eyes clear of tears and writes in his notebook, trying to find the words to express _grief._

*

He leaves Poland and its emptiness behind. He travels south, through Slovakia and Hungary and down into Romania. He arrives in Bucharest on Yom Kippur, and finds himself at a turreted, red brick temple a few blocks down from Unirii Square.

He was baptized Catholic, raised Catholic, confirmed Catholic. He knows this, now. But on Yom Kippur, he would watch his mother fast, would watch her pray, and he would ask. And she would say, “It’s the day of atonement, when we ask God to forgive our sins.”

“How?” Bucky had asked. He’d meant, _How do you do it without a priest?_ He’d meant, _How do you do it all by yourself?_

His mother had combed her hand gently through his hair and said, “Confess. Repent. Fix it. And if you cannot fix it, fix something else.”

She didn’t say anything more. She never did. She never said anything, never explained, never spoke any language but English. Except for the day she died, when she held Bucky’s hand and whispered a prayer he’d never heard before and has never heard since.

His mother died. His sisters went to stay with Aunt Ida, and Bucky moved in with Steve.

His mother’s been dead for 76 years. He wants to ask her, now, _How do you atone for sins this big? How do you ask forgiveness for sins you didn’t even want to commit?_

*

Bucky sits outside the temple in Bucharest all day and listens to the service. Songs and voices echo across the courtyard, and they sound like that final prayer. After darkness falls, and a horn blows from somewhere within, and the crowd streams out of the temple, and the last stragglers have trickled away slowly, the rabbi walks across the grass and goes through the gate and sits down next to Bucky.

“The service was nice,” Bucky offers after a few quiet minutes. He says it in Romanian, because neither Hydra nor the Russians ever bothered implanting him with Yiddish. It’s an easy thing to regret, this.

“Thank you,” the rabbi responds. “I am sorry you were not able to appreciate it from inside.”

Bucky shrugs his right shoulder. “I’m not… My mother was, but I’m not…”

The rabbi hums noncommittally. He’s the first person, other than ticket sellers and cashiers, that Bucky’s spoken to since he screamed at Steve in the belly of a helicarrier.

“And besides,” Bucky adds, because the rabbi isn’t pressing, and the sidewalk is empty, and this is his first willing, _human_ conversation in six months, in seventy years. “I shouldn’t go in, I’m not… I’ve done too many bad things.”

The rabbi isn’t looking at him when he asks, “You were a soldier?”

The word is the same in Romanian as it is in Russian. Bucky freezes for a moment, glancing around the street, and then answers, “Yes.”

“Ah,” his companion says, and nothing else. Silence seeps in around them like a warm blanket, despite the cars in the street and the retail stores taking up the rest of the neighborhood.

“They forced me do things,” he admits finally, bracing himself. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“They hurt you?” the rabbi asks softly.

Even prepared for the question, Bucky flinches. He pulls his left arm in closer to his body with his right, and holds it tightly. He nods, just once. He won’t explain. If his word is not enough, he’ll just leave.

“If they committed sins through you, then are they not the true sinners?”

“It was still me,” Bucky points out. “I still did it.”

“Would you do it again, now that you are free?” the rabbi asks, still so calm, exuding an inner peace Bucky is suddenly, fiercely jealous of.

Bucky thinks about the trigger words in his head, the Hydra forces that are still deployed across the globe, hidden in secret bunkers, waiting to find him, to take him back under their control, to strike out against the world again.

“I wouldn’t want to.”

*

After midnight, he climbs up onto the roof of the temple, into a hidden corner, and lies on his back, staring up at the sky.

_Confess. Repent. Fix it._

He can’t remember the words he’d say to the priest in Brooklyn. He can’t remember the words his mother would say, behind closed doors, muffled.

“I killed a lot of people,” he says, voice quiet, eyes locked on a single star visible through the glow of the city. “I’m trying to remember them all. I have a list. I don’t want to forget again.”

He takes a deep breath. Shifts, brings his right arm up to pillow his head. Flexes the metal fingers of his left hand where it rests against the rooftop. “I didn’t want to do it. And if I have any say in the matter, I won’t ever do it again.”

He closes his eyes, then, and whispers, so quiet only God could hear him, “I’m sorry.”

*

Bucharest is where Bucky stops, and where Bucky begins.

He gets a job with a construction company; something under the table, paid in cash at the end of each day. He has to wear protective clothing and work gloves that also serve to hide his arm. He digs ditches, and shovels concrete, and spreads tar. The work is smelly and dirty and long, but it’s work. It lets him rent a tiny room in a concrete apartment block. It lets him stop stealing. And it helps quiet his mind during the long days, so that he can spend the nights carefully sorting his thoughts.

He thinks about the Hydra secrets stored inside his head, stacked up next to triggers and guns and memories of blood. What he could do with those secrets: track down Hydra cells, fight their agents, drag them out into the light.

He can’t. He can’t. Can’t take the chance that they’ll say the right combination of words to make the past six months disappear. To make him lose his memories again, lose his emotions again, lose his...whatever morals he’s rebuilt, rediscovered, regained from before a time when he was just a weapon in their hands.

The memories of his mother. The memories of Steve. The memories of a time when his choices seemed to matter, when he could choose to do the right thing, choose whose orders he follows, choose to aim and pull the trigger — or choose not to.

He wakes up some nights gasping, heart hammering, from dreams where someone tells him to kill and he doesn’t say no.

He doesn’t go after Hydra. Instead, he buys another notebook, and begins writing down their secrets. _Weapons cache, Boston. Grey building across from First United Bank. Elevator code 5-2-2-2-1. Two guards._

_Bunker, southern end of the Zone Rouge, 15 kilometers west of Verdun._

_Communications hub, Philadelphia, warehouse 672, access code 578-DHQ-3902-L._

*

He goes to the library and takes out books on 20th-century history: The end of World War II, the beginning of the Cold War, the fall of the USSR. He starts putting names to the faces in his memories (the woman in the blue dress, the man in the motorcade, the man in the brown apartment).

The woman in the blue dress has a daughter who lives in Paris. The man in the motorcade has a living daughter and three grandchildren. The man in the brown apartment has no one, but there are other names, other people on the list, who have loved ones left behind who remember them.

 _Apologize to those you have wronged, if you can_ , his mother says in his memories. He cannot make amends to the dead. He doesn’t know how to make amends to the living.

He cannot just walk up to them and say, “Thirty years ago, Hydra had me shoot your mother. I’m sorry.” Wouldn’t that hurt them more than just letting it lie? Would they try to kill him? Would he let them? Should he let them?

Or, would they call the authorities, tell them the Winter Soldier is in their home, send Hydra out to find him again?

Any contact is a risk. Any attempt to make amends in person carries too much danger of exposure, of discovery, of capture. Hydra cannot have their weapon back.

He cannot fight Hydra. He cannot apologize to his victims or their kin, without making more victims in the end.

 _Frustration,_ he writes in his book, the list of emotions he’s discovered hiding in his heart after seventy years of suppression. _Powerlessness. Despondence._

*

_If you cannot fix it, fix something else._

*

Sokovia explodes onto the news. He sees Steve’s face everywhere, suddenly. On the covers of newspapers and magazines. On the television in the corner of the convenience store. In Bucky’s dreams — fighting in the forest, fighting in concrete bunkers, fighting in dark alleys.

He remembers when Steve was small, and fought anyone who was bigger than him. He remembers when Steve was big, and the only thing bigger than him was the entire German army.

(He fought that, too).

He remembers Steve pulling him off a table, in the place where it all began. He remembers Steve, refusing to come stay with Bucky after Mrs. Rogers’ funeral. He remembers Steve, inviting Bucky to stay with him after Mrs. Barnes’ funeral.

Steve hated accepting help, but he loved to give it. Bucky wonders if Steve could help him with this.

Bucky wonders if Steve knows everything that he’s done, everyone he’s killed. If Steve would still forgive him. If “Till the end of the line” can still hold true even after everything, everything.

He still doesn’t know what to do.

He works. He pays for everything he needs. He doesn’t hurt anyone. He doesn’t think that’s enough.

*

Tony Stark is on the news, and that’s when Bucky remembers beating Howard and his wife to death on an empty roadway, because Howard had something Hydra wanted, and that meant Howard and his wife had to die.

He breathes through the flashback, through the panic, through the _anxiety, horror, shame_.

He’s already written in his first notebook about seeing Howard Stark crash and burn at the technology exhibition on his last night in New York. Then meeting him again a year later, when Howard gave Steve the shield.

He gets back to his room, back to privacy, and writes their names in his second book.

Then he opens the third book and writes about the other Winter Soldiers waiting on ice in Siberia, waiting to be woken up, waiting to be pointed at something, or someone, to destroy.

*

_If you cannot fix it, fix something else._

*

He cannot apologize to the families of his other victims, because Hydra will find him and take back their weapon.

But Tony Stark is Iron Man. Tony Stark has been fighting Hydra, and winning. Tony Stark could use the information in Bucky’s third book to take down the rest of Hydra, to stop the other Winter Soldiers from ever being used against the world.

And if Tony Stark wants to kill him, in revenge for killing his parents...Bucky won’t stop him.

*

Bucky travels back the way he came.

He takes the tour at Auschwitz again, searches out the photos of people who look like him, stares into their eyes and wonders if they would understand. He walks the streets of Częstochowa, finds the homes where his grandparents were born, where new families with new names now live. In his notebook, he writes _Bitterness_ and _Loss_.

He boards the ocean liner in Hamburg, and writes _Anticipation_ and _Closure_.

He disembarks. He walks to the building on East 5th Street. He sits on the front stoop and writes _Rejection_ and _Defeat_. He thinks about his mother and his sisters, and adds _Affection_ and _Caring._

He doesn’t plan it, not really. Not consciously. But he thinks it’s still fitting that he finally walks into the lobby of Stark Tower on Erev Yom Kippur.

_On Yom Kippur we apologize for our sins against God. On the day before, we apologize for our sins against people._

He walks into the lobby of Stark Tower and holds up his hands.

*

The security guards are well-trained. Bucky doesn’t fight them. They bring him to a room in the basement, one with no windows and one heavy steel door. The bonds they use to tie his left arm to a concrete pillar are some metal he’s never seen before, and strong.

They search him for weapons. All they find is the stack of notebooks, which they place on a table, far out of reach of Bucky’s hands.

He waits.

*

Tony Stark shows up in the Iron Man suit. He walks through the doorway, making the floor shake with every booted step, and says, “Cap’s on his way.”

“I’m not here to talk to him,” Bucky says quietly, looking at the glowing light at the center of Stark’s chest.

“Then who are you here to talk to?”

He glances at Stark’s face, never quite meeting his eyes. “You.”

Stark jerks his head and takes a step backward. “Why?”

Bucky nods his head at the notebooks on the table. “Every Hydra secret I could remember. Bases you haven’t found yet. Bank accounts. And the location of a cryogenically frozen squad of Winter Soldiers hidden in Siberia. It’s all written down in one of those notebooks.”

Stark pauses, hand reaching for the top notebook. “That all? What’s in the other notebooks, the president’s top secret nuclear codes?”

Bucky shakes his head. “The second book is a list of everyone Hydra made me kill.”

Stark picks up the stack, splays them out in his hand like they’re poker cards. His face is deadly serious, even though his voice is light. “Dare I ask about the third?”

He looks away. Now that he’s here, the third book doesn’t seem important anymore. “Hydra’s agents said a lot of things when they thought I wasn’t going to— when they thought I wouldn’t hear them, or understand. You can use that information to take down Hydra for good.”

“If you knew all this stuff, what took you so long to show up? We’ve been fighting Hydra out in the open since the day you went nuts on Project Insight,” Stark demands, and all Bucky can do is shrug in his bonds.

“I don’t know.” He’s not going to burden Stark with the knowledge of what the past eighteen months have been like. Going from barely knowing his own name, to discovering the names of 70 years’ worth of victims. Including the two that brought him here. The two that matter to the man in front of him the most.

“Why’d you come to me, and not your super-soldier boyfriend?” Stark asks. He still hasn’t opened any of the books. “All he does all day is pine over you and strike a pose with his biceps. It’s very distracting to the rest of the team.”

“Stark,” Bucky says. His voice comes out in a rasp, defeated, and he feels that intelligent gaze laser in on him. He raises his eyes to meet it. Stark deserves that much. “Your parents’ names are in the second book.”

The helmet of the Iron Man suit slams down to hide Stark’s face, even as the arms rise and start to charge — a sharp, piercing crescendo of sound.

“Why are you telling me this?” Stark asks, and the speakers filter out any emotion that may be in his voice. Bucky can guess what those might be. Anger. Hate. Old, old, festering grief.

“I can’t fix it. I can’t apologize to them,” Bucky says, staring at the glowing lights hiding Stark’s eyes. “So I’m apologizing to you, and acknowledging what I did. And giving you something to atone for it.”

“You think that makes up for what you did? Those were my parents, and you come in here—” A burst of white energy shoots out of his gauntlets, striking the concrete above Bucky’s head and showering him with pieces of debris. His shoulders hunch inward, defensively, but he still doesn’t look away.

“Howard was your _friend!_ ” Stark shouts. “And you— you—”

“Yeah. I did.” Bucky nods, and lowers his eyes. He’s made his confession. He’s made his attempt at amends. What happens next is all up to the man in front of him. “If Steve’s on his way, you’ll need to kill me before he gets here. Otherwise he’ll fight you over me.”

“What?” Stark asks, and even through the mask he can hear the shock in it, displacing some of the wrath. “What did you— You came here _expecting_ me to—”

“You can tell him I attacked you and it was self-defense. He’ll forgive you for it.”

He closes his eyes, waiting for the blast. It’s quiet for a few long moments. Then, instead of fire, there’s a sharp jab, like a needle, and as the world turns white he thinks he hears, “Jesus Christ, now I’ve got two suicidal super soldiers to deal with, what the hell am I supposed t...”

*

When Bucky wakes up, he’s lying down on something soft, and he’s not restrained. He frowns, confused, and from above him, Steve’s voice says, “You’re safe, Buck.”

He sits up and opens his eyes. He’s been laid out on a bed, on top of the covers, in a bedroom with windows that look out over the jagged Manhattan skyline. Steve is sitting on a chair next to the bed with a paperback book open on his lap.

Bucky’s notebooks are stacked on the nightstand. He nods at them. “Did you read them?”

“Two of them,” Steve admits, not looking at all contrite. Good. He shouldn’t. “I thought the private one should stay private.”

Bucky nods. “How is Stark?” he asks, making Steve lean back in his seat and sigh.

“Pretty shaken. It’s not every day he gets offered revenge on a silver platter,” Steve responds, sarcasm heavy in his tone. Bucky remembers it being there often.

“He didn’t take it,” Bucky points out. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t understand. It was all supposed to be over.

“Yeah, that’s Tony for you,” Steve says, a wry twist to his lips. Bucky vividly remembers seeing that expression other times, years ago, and thinking it was...thinking it was funny.

It’s not funny today. Steve is staring at him like...like he has a lot of feelings he’s not saying anything about. Bucky knows he used to be able to read Steve like a cheap dime-store paperback, but he must have lost the skill along with so, so much else.

_Bitterness. Regret._

Bucky looks around the room again, suddenly desperate to escape Steve’s knowing glance. He asks, “What happens now?”

Instead of answering, Steve stands up from the chair, and reaches out his hand to pull Bucky to his feet. His hand is warm. “You fasting today?”

“I — what?”

Steve frowns, and tilts his head, and even that is familiar. “It’s Yom Kippur. You always said, when you grew up, you’d fast like your ma did.”

“You remember that?” Bucky asks. He doesn’t remember saying that, making that promise. He thought he’d remembered so much. Maybe some things are lost forever.

“Course I do,” Steve replies, like it’s inevitable, like it’s just...natural that Steve remember something so trivial, so minor, so.... “I know everything about you, Buck.”

“Tell me,” Bucky says, feeling suddenly desperate to know, to find an answer to one single question. Steve’s memory is suddenly a miracle, _Steve_ is suddenly… “ _Steve_. Tell me why we’d always walk to East 5th Street and back every Sunday.”

Steve’s face softens, then, and he sits down on the side of the bed. Bucky sits next to him, expectant, waiting, _hopeful_.

“Your ma and her parents had a falling out when she got married to your dad,” he explains softly. “So when she had you and your sisters, she’d take you past their place every week so that they would see you and know who you were.”

Steve pauses the story to wipe his nose. “She was so damn proud of you, Buck. I know she still is. And so am I.”

Bucky lets out a long, slow breath as he absorbs Steve’s words.  His mother’s face — blurry, faded, not quite there for the past year and a half — floats to the front of his mind. Finally, finally, he can see her clearly, dark hair and deep eyes and—

He stands up and steps over to the side table, and takes the top book off the stack. The first book. _His_ book.

Bucky sits back down next to Steve, pressing into his side. Steve shifts, lifts his arm to drape over Bucky’s shoulders. Steve, who didn’t die of asthma at 12. Steve, who didn’t die in ice at 27. Steve, who brought back Bucky’s memories of his mother, of his family, of himself. Who can maybe help him find the rest.

He pulls the pen out of its spine, flips to a new page, and writes, _Love_.

*

Three days later, while Steve is off having a meeting with some members of his team to go through the third notebook, Tony Stark tracks Bucky down in Steve’s apartment. He’s sitting at the kitchen table with the newspaper, and glances up to see Stark in the doorway.

Bucky closes the paper, sets it down, and waits for Stark to speak.

Stark sighs and walks into the room. He takes a seat across from Bucky and rests his elbows on the table, one hand folded on top of the other.

“So,” Stark eventually begins, back to that light, careless tone. “Creepy Hydra brainwashing, then?”

“Yes,” Bucky says.

“Chemicals, electric shock, restraints, that sort of thing?”

Bucky doesn’t know what his face shows. He hears a crinkling sound, and looks down to see the newspaper clenched in his right hand, the knuckles white, fingers straining. It takes him a long time to release the muscles, to let go of the paper and lay his hand flat on the table. He stares at it. Says, “Yes.”

There’s a pause, while he waits for Stark’s response. He glances up. Stark is staring at him and rubbing the front of his left shoulder absently, like he doesn’t realize he’s doing it. He finally says, “So when you came in here and told me you killed my parents, and that it would be totally cool if I killed you for it, that was, what? The Winter Soldier version of suicide-by-cop? A get-out-of-guilt-free card, one time use only?”

Bucky shakes his head and sighs. It’s ten in the morning and he’s already exhausted. “Everything I did, everything they made me do, you’re the only person whose forgiveness I could ask for without Hydra showing up to collect me ten minutes after the 911 call.”

“You could have just stayed in hiding and not talked to anyone for the rest of your super-soldiery life, and you certainly could have avoided bothering me,” Stark says.

“No,” Bucky says. “I couldn’t.”

Stark stares him down. “So you show up at my door with a notebook full of Hydra secrets and a death wish.”

He shakes his head again, even though he doubts himself, even though he knows that maybe...maybe it was both. “That’s not what it was.”

“No,” Stark says, slapping his hand on the table and glaring. “I think that’s exactly what it was. You set me up to kill a depressed victim, not a villain.”

Bucky flinches, and Stark sees it, and leans forward to ask, “And what if I had done it? What if I had done it, and _then_ read your teenaged diaries, what would that have made me? What kind of— what would that have made me?”

Bucky looks away, avoids the anger in Stark’s eyes, the judgment, the contempt. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well, lucky for you, I’m in a pretty good emotional place right now,” Stark mutters, and stands from the table. “We’ll get you set up with some therapists, some trauma specialists, I know a funny-looking guy in an ascot who can pull those trigger words right out of your head. Give it a few months, you’ll be right as rain.”

“Stark—”

“Don’t!” the man interrupts, turning away from the table and stalking to the door. He pauses in the doorway, his back to Bucky. “As for the other thing, you didn’t— it wasn’t—”

Stark huffs out a breath and turns around, pointing his finger at Bucky sternly. “Don’t ask any more people to kill you. It’s impolite.”

He turns away again and steps through the doorway, adding, “And anyway, I forgive you. Don’t bring it up again,” and then stalking away down the hall before Bucky can say anything in response.

Bucky drags his right hand through his hair and stares at the empty doorway, trying to piece together the last five minutes, Stark’s words echoing between his ears. _I forgive you_.

He hadn’t planned for what happens next, hadn’t known what to expect, had only thought to expect the worst. Apparently, what happens next is...

Living with Steve, who seems to know the names of all the emotions Bucky feels, even though he himself can’t seem to ever get a handle on his own, and maybe that’s something they can help each other with.

Sharing a building with Stark, who...doesn’t know Bucky at all, but still seems to have him completely figured out.

Sharing a world with people he’s hurt, and not letting that knowledge overwhelm him, drown him, defeat him.

Acceptance. Support. Recovery.

He walks into the bedroom. His first notebook is on the side table, still, the others off in some locked vault somewhere. He opens it to the most recent entry in the story of his life, the story of his mother’s life, the story of Steve’s life, the story of his journey to get where he is today, the story that will continue into tomorrow and the next day and the next. He looks at the word he wrote, that he rediscovered, on Yom Kippur. Underneath it, he writes, _Repentance._

**Author's Note:**

> Find me at jhscdood.tumblr.com.
> 
> Update: quietnight made fanart of the scene where Bucky is on the roof of the temple and it is ABSOLUTELY STUNNING OMFG. Please go check it out (link below) and tell q she is amazing!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Teshuva](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15706479) by [quietnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight)




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